Google+’s Circles feature to organize your contacts into distinct groups is generating a lot of discussion about how to best use this new tool. Some people are exited to finally have a degree of privacy and publishing control not found in Twitter, Facebook or other social sites. But is this privacy control or merely “privacy […]

About two days ago, my Google homepage suddenly became hostile toward me. By hostile, I mean my IE7 browser is suddenly reporting a bunch of JavaScript errors and faults when loading the Google homepage that it wasn’t reporting before. Whenever I visit my Google homepage now, I have to wade through 5 or 6 JavaScript error […]

I dropped by the Computer History Museum today to check out this year’s Mashup Camp and see what’s hot and what’s not. Turnout was good, about the same as what I remember at Mashup Camp in 2006 (or was it 2007?) – roughly 150 people milling about. Today was pretty much sponsor’s day – the […]

Dion Almer of Ajaxian fame has announced he is leaving Google to head up a new developer tools group at Mozilla with longtime friend and Ajaxian cofounder Ben Galbraith. The two are quite the dynamic duo in the web development sphere and should bring a lot of energy and fresh ideas to the table in […]

Lukas Biewald lays bare his frustrations with Amazon’s S3 service, particularly after the recent S3 service outtage that left his FaceStat business offline for more than 7 hours recently. Actually, Lukas has double posted on this issue – he has a much more scathing criticism of S3 over on his own blog: “Amazon S3 Screws […]

Radiohead has released a video for its “House of Cards” song that has the peculiar distinction of being a live-action video filmed without cameras. According to the Google Blog post “No Camera, No Lights, Just Data“, the imagery was created using 3D scanning lasers and detectors. The video, hosted online by Google, is visually interesting, but the […]

WordPress.com, the commercial blog hosting company that uses blog software from WordPress.org, is adding Google Gears support to their hosted blog service. Initially, this will only speed up use of the blog administration pages by caching the scripts and images locally. This isn’t really the best use of Gears, since the browser will cache content as it’ is […]

I’ve just received a letter from Google that personal data of Google employees hired prior to December 31, 2005 may have been stolen in the May 26 burglary of Colt Express Outsourcing Services. No credit card numbers were in the stolen data, just names, addresses, SSNs – all the info needed for a thief to […]

There has been a bit of pot-stirring on the blogs this weekend. Dare Obasanjo reflects on recent migrations of Google engineers to Microsoft, using the “e” word (exodus). Dion Almaer fires back, pointing out that people move between companies all the time, hardly justification for the “exodus”. Both are right, and both are wrong. First […]

We’ve just pushed out a PicLens 1.6 update that adds web search to the immersive 3D PicLens media experience. This release runs in Firefox Mac and Firefox Windows. While zooming around in images on the 3D wall, hit Tab to select the Search box in the top right corner of the screen (or mouse click on […]

Although Google’s recently announced OpenSocial APIs are described as presenting a unified API for developers to tap into a variety of disparate social networks, the truth is the only unification is that the different vendors use a similar set of function verbs and response schemas. OpenSocial is a pattern that a social network vendor can […]

Here are a few observations from my first 10 minutes of surfing around in the Google OpenSocial API docs. Google OpenSocial has two sets of APIs: JavaScript for web pages, and ATOM / REST style APIs for server apps or “installed client” (non-browser, presumably native code) apps. The ATOM/REST APIs are collectively called the OpenSocial […]

TechCrunch reports that Google is set to announce and reveal a new web API called OpenSocial today, Nov 1. This API is supposed to enable developers to build applications that can leverage an end user’s social network, but without requiring the developer to choose which of the many silo’d social networks to support. The OpenSocial […]

When people ask what I worked on at Google and I answer “undisclosed browser technology”, I think some folks think I’m just being coy or obnoxious. The truth is, I’m required to say that publicly and privately until Google publicly announces the technology or its derivatives. Well, that day has finally come. Yesterday Google announced the […]

Last week Kevin Ledley, keeper of the dev.live.com content, asked me for a bit of help to get a Silverlight video player working. He wanted to “borrow” the cool scrolling video list and video player from our sister site, msdn2.microsoft.com and set it up on our dev.live.com homepage to show Windows Live related videos from […]